Rafito el Varado Gets Stranded in the Sargosio Manuscript

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Rafito el Varado always suspected books were dangerous, but he never imagined one would eat him.

It happened on an afternoon that felt like a page already yellowing at the edges. He was sitting beneath the crumbling ridge of an old hill-fort—stones like half-erased thoughts—reading a water-stained copy of The Sargosio Manuscript. The book was said to be written by a monk who had disappeared mid-sentence, leaving nothing behind but an ink blot shaped like a startled crow.

The landscape around him shimmered oddly, as if the paint were still drying. The green tree near the ruined wall flickered like it was thinking of becoming another color. Rafito shrugged; the world had been behaving like that ever since he turned fifty-seven and refused to age another hour.

He read aloud a passage about “the valley that forgets it is a valley,” and the moment he reached the word forgets, the ground tilted. The hillside bent inward. Stone shadows dissolved into paragraphs. The sky folded like a book jacket. By the time Rafito stood up, he was already inside chapter seven.

The Sargosio Manuscript was not a place so much as a mood—an unsettled blend of lost architectures and melted light. Hills rose like riddles, and the ruins rearranged themselves whenever he blinked. A castle-shaped thought hovered at the top of the ridge, refusing to decide whether it had ever been real.

Rafito wandered through footnotes made of dust and footpaths made of grammar. Each time he tried to leave, the text revised itself, writing a slightly more confused version of him. There were days when he was “Rafito el Varado, accidental explorer of marginalia,” and others when the manuscript insisted he was “Rafito, son of the wind-stains,” or simply “that man who refuses to die correctly.”

On the tenth day—though time was more suggestion than fact—Rafito discovered a sentence shaped exactly like the ruined wall he’d been sitting beside in the real world. He pressed his hand against the clause, and the clause pressed back. A small door appeared, made entirely of commas, punctuating the slope.

He stepped through and found himself back beneath the hillside, the world crisp again, the manuscript closed at his feet. A breeze moved through the trees like someone turning a page.

Rafito picked up the book carefully, the way one holds a sleeping animal that might wake hungry. He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.

The Sargosio Manuscript had already written a chapter about him.